Definitely one of the cat-and-mouse games between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo is him trying to pin down just what is real in the stories. He wants to totally possess his lands not just through conquest but also through knowledge and understanding of them. Some of the tales may be baloney but not all. After all, even if Marco Polo is just associatively spinning tales GPT style, his “training data” inputs had to come from somewhere. Going meta, we the readers holding this absurd book are in the position of k.k. and Calvino the writer is m.p.